Windmills off the East Coast could generate enough electricity to replace most, if not all, the coal-fired power plants in the United States, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said Monday. But those numbers were challenged as "overly optimistic" by a coal industry group, which noted that half the nation's electricity currently comes from coal-fired power plants.

Wind over waters less than 100 feet deep could supply at least 20 percent of the electricity needs of most coastal states, the Interior Department report says. Erecting wind turbines in shallow water would be cheaper and easier than in deep water. But allowing North Carolina's first commercial-scale wind turbines won't be a quick or easy decision.

Nothing underscores the green movement's soul-searching more than its conflicted view of coal, which provides about half the world's electricity. Should society pour billions of dollars into trying to perfect a way to turn coal into electricity without emitting greenhouse gases? Or should it reject coal as inalterably dirty and try to replace it entirely with renewable sources like the wind and sun? ...But last month, the NRDC, along with the Environmental Defense Fund, another prominent group, hosted workshops advocating more spending on clean-coal research.

This is how it worked: Large financial institutions like AIG, Wachovia, J.P. Morgan, Wells Fargo, Lehman Brothers and others would buy federal tax benefits from renewable energy startups that did not have enough taxable income to use the credits on their own. In other words, big financial firms traded financing to offset tax liability. ...No more. The system, like other schemes crafted by insiders, has crumbled as AIG, Lehman and others have collapsed. The big boys no longer have cash to bankroll projects or the means to pull the profits to get credits, so the tax-equity space has turned into a financial dead zone.

Windmills and solar panel arrays have become symbols of America's growing interest in alternative energy. Yet as Congress begins debating new rules to restrict carbon dioxide emissions and promote electricity produced from renewable sources, an underlying question is how much more Americans will be willing to pay to harness the wind and the sun.

Crude prices fell sharply yesterday and natural gas tumbled to seven-year lows as a worsening economy led to more painful cuts in the industrial sector. ...By yesterday, a stronger dollar helped push investors away from commodities.

His company purchased 687 wind turbines from General Electric for $2 billion that can produce 1,000 MW and will be delivered in 2011. But there aren't yet any transmission lines from his wind park to the Texas grid to deliver the electricity to the Texans. Initially he was going to build the transmission lines himself, but now that's "questionable," he said during a stop in San Francisco Wednesday, part of a tour to promote his alternative-energy plan. A transmission line to the west or east from the Texas Panhandle, he told members of the press, is "a little bit big for us."

Congress has voted to set aside more than 2 million acres in nine states as protected wilderness from California's Sierra Nevada mountains to the Jefferson National Forest in Virginia. The legislation, which opponents, mostly Republicans, called a "land grab" that would block energy development on vast swaths of federal land, is on its way to President Barack Obama for his likely signature.

While President Obama has made development of cleaner energy sources a priority, an effort is underway to close off a large swath of the Southern California desert to solar and wind energy projects. In a move that could pit environmentalists and alternative energy industries against each other, the senator wants hundreds of thousands of acres in California designated as a national monument.

Saint John-based Irving Oil Ltd. is studying the potential construction of a 500- to 600-megawatt natural gas-fired power plant to sell into the energy-hungry New England market. The project was revealed as New Brunswick Premier Shawn Graham and Maine Gov. John Baldacci were in Saint John announcing their governments' intention to explore the development of an energy corridor to move electricity and natural gas between the Maritimes and New England.

Bureaucratic infighting is holding up one of the Obama administration's top goals in renewable energy - the construction of wind turbines off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts that would generate clean electricity and create "green" jobs. At the center of the fight are two obscure but powerful federal agencies, each of which claims the ability to approve new wave and tidal energy projects along the outer continental shelf. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and the Minerals Management Service (MMS) each says it has the sole authority to issue permits and licenses, and neither is willing to budge.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said Monday that the waters off the Atlantic coast hold some of the country's greatest wind energy potential, and he promised to move aggressively to develop plans to exploit the resource. In an interview with The Associated Press, Salazar called for the creation of "renewable energy zones" to smooth development of offshore wind projects and to spur solar energy in the Southwest and onshore wind energy in the Great Plains.

The bill sponsored by the Senate majority leader is expected to receive a good deal of attention in Congress this year as lawmakers focus on President Barack Obama's goals to increase use of solar, wind and other renewable energy sources. The Senate energy committee has scheduled a hearing on it later this month. Streamlined planning and utility line siting in the bill could save years, a Reid aide said. A high voltage transmission project that normally would take 8-16 years to build could be completed in three to five years if all deadlines were met.

The 111th Congress is poised to usher in the largest expansion of the nation's wilderness in a generation, with 2.1 million acres of public land in line for the strictest environmental protections allowed under federal law. ...wind farms, solar arrays and geothermal plants are forbidden in wilderness areas, said Mike Olsen, a former Interior senior administrator now with the environmental strategies group at the law firm Bracewell & Giuliani. That is a huge concern, Olsen said, because the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act includes billions of dollars in incentives and tax breaks to encourage the development of renewable energy.

As the U.S. government moves ever closer to enacting a new national energy policy, dialogue concerning the potential for a national clean-energy smart grid has moved to the forefront of many high-level discussions. In the past two months, white papers, policy papers, and public discourse and roundtables have focused on proposals for making critical changes to the policy framework for this country's electrical transmission and distribution system. These are radical proposals, some say, while others insist that public infrastructure reconstruction -- in particular, a reconstruction of the electric grid infrastructure -- is "no less urgent than the Marshall Plan."

They also face a chicken-and-egg dilemma: power generators won't support a transmission line unless a utility says it needs the line to supply its customers, and utilities won't support a transmission line unless there is a power generator backing it up. So two companies-Chinook Power Transmission, LLC and Zephyr Power Transmission, LLC, both of which are owned by TransCanada Corporation-proposed to take a new approach, entering into an agreement to provide half of the capacity on their proposed new transmission lines to wind developers.

Across the Great Plains the wind blows incessantly, while in the remote Nevada desert the sun bears down without relief. Each holds the potential of a vast new energy resource. While wind turbine and solar projects are ready to capture this new, eco-friendly energy source, where are the transmission lines to get the power to where it is needed?

The U.S. government would gain broad new powers to determine where to build transmission lines that link renewable energy to the electric system under legislation to be unveiled by the Senate's top Democrat this week. The measure is likely to step up a long-simmering debate about the federal government's role in upgrading the U.S. transmission system. Projects to bring wind, solar and geothermal power from remote areas to big cities have been hamstrung amid layers of regulatory hurdles.

Depending on whom you talk to, emerging plans to build 765,000 volt transmission lines to bring power from the "Saudi Arabia of wind" in the Dakotas to population centers in the Midwest and East Coast are either vital to the nation or a boondoggle waiting to happen. "This state has vast resources it can't use without building new power lines," says Mr. Nelson, gesturing at lines on a grid map at the East River Electric Power Cooperative in Madison, where he is manager.